UseQuitter.com Aides in Twitter Breakups

When a follower decides to no longer follow you, there’s no goodbye. There’s not even any notification. That’s where Qwitter comes in.

Qwitter is a service that notifies you when someone un-follows you on Twitter. Users receive a daily e-mail that includes the qwitter’s name and the last tweet the user sent that may have caused the breakup.

UseQwitter.com, which was originally developed by a group based in Ireland, launched in late 2008. Because of programming issues, however, the site was shut down almost a year later. The new and improved site was re-launched in March after Houston-based Agora Technologies bought it.

Agora Technologies CEO Brad Harris said Qwitter had 25,000 existing users when they bought the site. After 90 days, membership spiked to 80,000 users. The site is bound to attract even more users after recently launching its premium services, which offers additional features for an annual fee.

“It gained a lot of momentum and a lot of attraction,” Harris said. “There are a lot of people interested in this information. We didn’t know, when we bought the site, just how interested people were in actually tracking this information.”

If someone qwits you, to hell with them, right? Well, it can actually be useful to find out who leaves you on Twitter.

Twitter has become an integral part of social media marketing for businesses. Therefore, people or companies who use the site for business may find the tool very useful.

“It gives the businesses an opportunity to actually review what it was that they were tweeting about on those days when they had a high loss of people,” Harris said. “It also gives them an opportunity to reach out to those people so they can get feedback. It’s giving more power and understanding to their own social media reach.”

The average person, particularly the college crowd, may also find Qwitter valuable.

“The way we talk to each other and communicate with each other has to do with the more people that you have, the more power that you have in your own social media reach,” Harris said. “There’s a lot of curiosity, if anything. If you have 1,000 followers and one person drops off and Twitter doesn’t report it, there’s a lot of curiosity about that and people want to know.”

If anything, Qwitter can help influence virtual manners. After all, with the emergence of online social media and social networking outlets, online etiquette can potentially affect real-life relationships.

“We’re moving so fast in our society with how we communicate with one another that we don’t really have a guidebook anymore for telling us how we should do certain things in the world of social media,” Harris said. “I think it’s definitely useful as a tool; it’s just one more potential tool in your social media toolbox.”